Few actresses have appeared in as many films so regularly revived on TV as Olivia de Havilland, most notably Gone With the Wind (1939), for which she received the first of her five Oscar nominations, but also the eight adventure yarns she made with Errol Flynn, among them Captain Blood (1935) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).

She was born in Tokyo, the daughter of a cultivated British lawyer who'd written a book on Go, the Japanese board game, and was brought up in California by her mother, a former actress, along with her younger sister, actress Joan Fontaine (Screen Legend 67). A rivalry with Joan that led to a long-standing breach between them may have started when the nine-year-old Olivia said she had made a will that said: "I bequeath all my beauty to my younger sister Joan because she has none."

Olivia was named after the heroine of Twelfth Night, and in her first film (though not the first released) she was Hermia in Max Reinhardt's 1935 A Midsummer Night's Dream. An overwhelming number of her pictures were to be costume dramas, ranging from the English court in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939) to the late Victorian New York of The Heiress (1949), a version of Henry James's Washington Square, in which she won her second Oscar as a supposedly mousy spinster. To these roles she brought sparkling eyes and a radiant smile in an open face, her speciality being demure middle-class ladies. When in 1950 she turned down the part of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (it went to her Gone With the Wind co-star Vivien Leigh), she said: "A lady doesn't say or do these things on the screen."

Yet like her close friend Bette Davis, she had fought Warner Brothers to get better, more challenging roles, and two of her best postwar performances brought her out of bonnets and into the modern world. The first was the dual role of good and bad sister in Robert Siodmak's noir classic The Dark Mirror (1946), and a harrowing performance as an incarcerated housewife in The Snake Pit (1948), a historically important Hollywood exposé of the grim conditions in state mental hospitals.

From the 50s onwards, her film roles were few and she usually played elegant matrons. The most interesting are Lady in a Cage (1964) as a crippled widow trapped in a lift and terrorised by sadistic intruders, and Robert Aldrich's gothic melodrama Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), in which, as a last-minute replacement for Joan Crawford, she torments Bette Davis. Her most distinguished later role was a Texas rancher's ailing wife in Sam Peckinpah's exquisite TV film of Katherine Anne Porter's novella Noon Wine (1966).

From the 1950s, de Havilland has lived in France, married from 1955 to 1979 to her second husband, the editor of Paris Match, Pierre Galante, with whom she had a daughter. After their divorce, they remained friends and she nursed him through his final illness in the 90s. In 1965, she was the first woman to preside over a Cannes jury; it gave the Palme d'Or to Dick Lester's The Knack.

De Havilland on typecasting "I think playing bad girls is a bore. I have always found more luck with good girl roles because they require more from an actress."

An immortal moment As Charlotte Brontë in Devotion (1946), Olivia was escorted round London by Sydney Greenstreet's Thackeray and there ensued the memorable exchange with a passing stranger: "G'morning Thackeray." "G'morning Dickens."

Aeronautical connection Her cousin was Sir Geoffrey de Havilland, pioneer aviator and designer of the de Havilland Mosquito, a key Second World War aircraft.

Essential DVDs A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Gone With the Wind, The Strawberry Blonde, Hold Back the Dawn, The Dark Mirror, The Heiress.